Welcome to the beautiful world of Aquascaping! And I'm gonna spill the water! We're gonna do a Betta tank today. Because I really wanna do better, than Tommy did. He did a very-very successful video, scaping a Betta tank in just 15 minutes. Okay, he did like one minute over, or something. That video is already at 530.000 views, which is really a lot. It's one of the most popular videos, here on the Green Aqua YouTube channel. So we thought, that I'm gonna do something similar here. Except that I'm not gonna take 15-17 minutes. To scape it... I'm gonna take hours to scape it. I wanna do hardscape for that Betta fish, to show the beauty of the fish. So we're gonna go into the warehouse now and we're gonna start assembling rocks. Stay with us! Also, I just realized, during the shooting of the plant tutorial with Tommy, that we didn't do any tanks, that have a full Marsilea foreground. So we're gonna also do that. Alright, so let's see what we have here! First of all, I've got my gloves, because I'm gonna handle rocks. The tank is actually 30x40 centimeters, because we've got 10 centimeters of filter chamber in the background. We're gonna use the black Seiryu stones, in this aquarium, because of the red color of this beautiful Betta fish. It's gonna be accentuated by the use of these rocks. We need to leave these openings empty, because the water will flow out through those openings there. Oops! I almost broke the glass. The main idea is to have as much empty space as possible, for him to swim around. We should be able to observe him all the time, so he should be visible all the time. He's gonna be the crown jewel of this tank. I've got the outflow on the top of the tank. I don't want to obstruct the outflow. I'm going to use background plants on the left side of the tank. And those are gonna cover the inflows. I wanna move gradually into the moss-covered rocks, on the right side. You can see that the triangle composition of the background rocks has already started to take shape. I'm gonna take the grey Impa glue. This is the glue that I'm using all the time. It doesn't do anything to the water. Okay, so this is the reacting agent right here. The more you use, the faster the glue will harden. Do you have to glue these rocks together? Maybe not, but it's gonna make your maintenance job a lot easier in the long run if you do so. Let's put the third piece in. You see that this part is attaching to the other rock, so I got to apply glue on this side here. I'm gonna use the ADA tweezers, to put on the small pebbles into the glue. And I got to be very careful, because I don't want to have glue on these. I'm gonna start looking for additional pieces of rocks, which will go on top of the structure, to further increase the height. I applied it to the wrong side. Don't tell anybody! I saved the rock. I just wiped it off. Round two! Balazs versus the rock. We're just building an L-shape structure here. The left side of the tank and the front side will be visible. The fish will swim in the middle, if it doesn't have any place to hide in the background. We're gonna fill everything with fine filter mesh. The joints will be covered by moss and I can also put moss in all the cracks, between the rocks and the glass. I'm not sure that I'm gonna be able to remove this hardscape later. But what goes in, comes out, right? The right side of the tank is kind of ready. Let's see what we can do on the left side! Round three! We don't have any girls walking around, you know. I think the glue has started to work on me. Alright, we're done! Let's take this whole thing back into the studio! Alright, so I think the tank has arrived. Thank you Szebi! This is a very solid hardscape. You could do whatever with it. I can see that the water will flow into the filtering chamber on the right side, here. And this is supposed to be filled with some filter pads. So we're gonna fill these two chambers up, with biological filter media. There's an Eheim Compact 300 pump in the last chamber. So the water will be forced, to come through the fine filter mesh. And I can always change this fine filter mesh. Okay, so why did I place the mat and the fine filter mesh like this? Because the first step of the filtration should be to catch all the physical particles, all the plant leaves, everything, that comes from the tank. The second step should be the biological filter media. So the whole filter, 90%, or 95% of the filter should be filled with biological filter media. Which will get into these two chambers here. People say that Betta fish do not need filtration, but they do. And then the last step of the filtration should be the fine filter mesh. Additionally, if you want, you can also place in Purigen. So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna take a bag of Purigen and I'm gonna place it in here, on the top of this whole thing. So that it gets the water crystal clear. We need a heater, because the Betta fish need heaters. They need about 28 degrees. They like warmer water. This is the smallest heater from Eheim. The 25W one. I've still got to introduce this. I'm just gonna put it here, I'm not gonna worry too much about it. Marsilea is the only low-tech carpeting plant. As I said... Did I say that? No, I didn't. We don't have any CO2 injection in this tank. So this is gonna be a low-tech tank. These don't really need the base layer fertilizing substrate, so I'm not gonna add that. I'm using Amazonia Light, because I really want to not have so much Ammonia from the beginning. Amazonia Light is a really good substrate for beginners also. How much we need here? We probably need only 3 liters. I need a little bit of height in the foreground, to allow the Marsilea roots, to be rooted nicely in there. I don't want the Betta to get in there... And in here. I'm gonna try to hide these spots. Okay! No place to hide! I could take these beautiful ADA Wabi-Kusa mats and cut them in small stripes, and add those stripes here. I really like building tanks like this! You can see that there is a stripe of glue there. I need to cover that with moss. Anubias does not really like the roots to be trimmed. So please be careful. Brick-building an aquarium. I never did that before. We're gonna try two different types of background plants here. The first one would be the Vallisneria americana, or the Echinodorus vesuvius [Old name for Helanthium]. It's a much bigger plant. I'm gonna introduce as many as I can, of this. I think this is much cleaner here. This one would be a mess. It would be too heavy. It is very important, you have to plant very heavily, from the beginning, if you have a low-tech tank. Because plants will spread out a lot slower. You can see this rhizome here. This is already a runner. And this is the problem with Vallisneria. It's gonna develop these runners and it's gonna try to go everywhere in the tank, but if you're trimming it regularly - and it's relatively easy, to keep it at bay in a tank like this -, you should be fine. I've got one more Anubias, that should go in here. It's gonna probably create a little problem down here. Maybe I should put it on a pebble. I'm gonna show you, what I learned from ADA suikei layout creator, Daichi Araki, in his workshop. This is how we prepare Anubias, which will be on a rock. We need the Wood Tight. Like that. Get the Anubias through the Wood Tight. How did they do this? It was much easier, when they did it. I've got the Marsilea hirsuta and I've got the Marsilea crenata. The Crenata is the smaller one. So I've got five pots of that. And that's gonna go in the foreground. So I'm gonna just tear it out, like that. Take a small chunk off, bend it, take the tweezers start from the corner, push it in, release. Timelapse! So this was five pots of Crenata, and I'm moving to the Hirsuta now. So actually I don't keep the one pot / one palm size area rule. Here I want to plant heavily from the beginning, in order to avoid algae. I'm not gonna have CO2 injection. All that remains to be done is to tweak the whole thing, with one pot of hairgrass, which we established that might die off. If it doesn't die off, then we're lucky. We're ready with the planting. Let's introduce the light! I've got the Twinstar light 300C here. This is the light. This is the stand. This is the adaptor. And let there be light! So this is a nice minimalist scape for Betta fish. You can see that it's very monochromatic. This is probably all dark green. We only have one thing to do now. Let's select the inhabitant! Let the selection process begin! It's not natural selection, it's unnatural selection, because I do it. We've got 14 Betta fish here. I think the red one should be great. Because if we have the greens of the plants and we have the bluish, greyish, blackish tint of the black Seiryu stones, then this red fish would contrast that perfectly. So my selection is that! We selected the beautiful red Betta fish. And I think we're ready! Please do not forget to subscribe, also hit that bell button, to get notified of our future uploads. Hit that like button, if you like this tank and this video! And we'll see you next week! Goodbye!
